


Doubt- Misc. Information [Sburb Glitch FAQ Guest Chapter]

by otherwiseGent



Category: Homestuck, Replay Value AU - Fandom
Genre: Replay Value AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-14
Updated: 2012-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 17:55:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/otherwiseGent/pseuds/otherwiseGent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fan work for the incomparable GodsGiftToGrinds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doubt- Misc. Information [Sburb Glitch FAQ Guest Chapter]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GodsGiftToGrinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodsGiftToGrinds/gifts).



DOUBT- Misc. Information

NOTE: Get it right

If you're one of those sorry sacks who calls Doubt Fear and insists that's the real name so you can mess with newbies, then I am going to come over to your house, remove your eyeballs, and clean them with bleach. Because if you're so blind that you think Doubt is called Fear, then the bleach can only improve your eyesight.

GLITCH: Creeper, where'd you get those peepers

Doubt is the element of fear, suspicion and illogical paranoia; thus the developers decided that their nethers would be ever-so-tickled if Doubt had a passive effect buff to make its user a spooky cookie. Thus they introduced [Staring] and [Stress] to let players harness spookiness for intimidation factor. The problem is that once they've been cast, the line to turn off the effects of each skill is bugged- you can reduce the amount of power you put into it so that you expend minimal Pluck, but it's still going to constantly drain your spooky voodoo gauge even if it is 1 point/minute. As an added bonus, you're not going to be able to turn off the powers.  
  
[Staring] turns your eyes into terrifying hellfestivals at higher levels; when you're expending as little Pluck as possible, your eyes will just be pinpricks or glassy, or maybe you'll burst a blood vessel. When you're actually getting into it, though, your eyes might look like the whites are made of oil, or there's demons behind them, or maybe just sockets with something living inside. On the plus side, you're going to be very intimidating to enemies; on the minus side YOUR EYES ARE PORTALS TO THE MINDFUCK DIMENSION.  
  
[Stress] expends less Pluck, as it doesn't really have higher levels; it's just a low-level aura of fear extending to every single action you do. Everything. I remember my first session with a Doubt player- he was a Knight of Doubt who really liked cookies. Completely unthreatening. So I walked into the Magicant, where we'd set up operations, and found him fist-deep in a cookie jar, having just cast [Stress] for the first time. He's just sitting there, eating an M&M cookie. Nothing threatening.  
  
We talked uneasily and awkwardly for a few minutes, then I left the Magicant, went back to my house and turned on all the lights.

ADVICE: What you don't know can't hurt you

[Horrorshow] is Doubt's basic attack skill, and honestly like everything Doubt does it's pretty freaking scary. Basically, what it does is that it concentrates "fear energy" (aka bullshit collages of every zalgo video/creepypasta/ghost story of the SHRIEKING SPECTER/whatever else on the internet) and turns it into a freaky shifting wave of illusions that slices things or flagellates them or whatever it's doing.  
  
So that sounds useful. Why does Doubt have such a low score in Offense? Well, it's because Doubt's fear energy can only do physical harm if you BELIEVE it will physically harm you. If you think it can't hurt you, then it can't. So Doubt's attacks won't work on people who are, say, too stupid to understand the danger (aka severe DERP) or who know that what you're doing isn't going to hurt them, or Rain players (too mad to fear) or the extremely single-minded. In the end, Doubt is completely powerless against people who know that you can't hurt them if they're not afraid, which is at once a pretty good metaphor for the nature of fear and infuriating bullshit that means you can't actually kill an imp if it doesn't see what you're doing to it.  
  
Of course, it's pretty hard to have calm and pleasant firmness in your lack of fear when Zalgo Spongebob is softly stroking your cheek with his greasy, bloody fingers and whispering about how yes, that doll you had when you were eight was alive and yes, it was watching you while you slept.  
  


TENDENCY: Doubt your senses

Doubt can create, well, literal doubt- not just fear, which would be, admittedly, pretty useful on its own, but distrust, suspicion, misinformation and misunderstanding. You can use this to create cheap sitcom scenarios where everyone thinks everyone else stole the cookies and nobody will sit down to discuss the bullshit or what people actually did for five freaking minutes, or you can not be terrible, do the sensible thing and use it to break up alliances, seclude your foes or make people think they don't have legs.  
  
The power of Doubt is entirely capable of making people think that their senses are lying to them, that they're hallucinating, that they're losing their minds- and make them believe so sincerely that they don't have working/existing legs (or arms or noses, take your pick) that they'll fall over in mid-stride (or swing or sniff or whatever the hell it is). And that's not all you can do. With a really well-pulled-off Doubt skill, you can convince a person they never had legs at all. Get it just perfect, and you can _convince them that legs aren't even real_.  
  
Yeah. That's right. Convince someone that walking is an urban legend. If you are not quivering with fear, you are either a Rain player or _from a species that didn't evolve legs_. Wait. Are you being influenced to believe legs aren't real? Right **NOW**?  
  
 _How would you even know?_

GLITCH: Heisenberg's uncertainty status

Doubt is uncertainty. What have learned about aspects that represent concepts like "non-existence", "too much existence" and other such concepts?  
  
If you chorused "that they're all fucked up statwise", please stop using coarse language. It is impolite. If you chorused "they have rather strange principles regarding their status points", that is correct, and snooty. So Void annihilates a single stat and makes it amazing or terrible, you can't really read a Mist player's stats because they're always freaking doubling and changing them, et cetera ad infinitum. Naturally, Doubt plays into this too.  
  
When you begin your journey as a Doubt hero, the game has no idea about any of your stats- not only their values, but to which stats those values are assigned. Instead, it finds the average of the stats for all those sharing your title- for example, a Prince of Doubt would get the average of all Princes of the same level. Then, because just assigning each average to the stat it corresponds to would be easy and make sense, it collects all the stats Princes have, assigns them to the Doubt player, and then randomly assigns values to stats.  
  
Also, every time you level up a stat normally, its level goes to the wrong stat- the one it switched with. So you can read for an hour or play a puzzle game and suddenly become stronger, or maybe lift a weight and become a better gardener. This is proof positive that SBURB was made by the world's most intelligent monkey on drugs.  
  
So if you go up a rank, unless you've got stats that are mostly the same, you're gonna have weird, weird stat variations. At higher levels, you can expect to see a Maid of Doubt uppercut an imp into the stratosphere, or a Knight of Doubt solving a puzzle by flexing really hard. Or a Waste of Doubt who's a really good gardener but can't cast for shit. Remember all those useless 0-value stats? Don't they sound far less fun now?

ADVICE: Don't drink the Kool-Aid

Doubt, for whatever reason, has the skill [Pure Sobriety], and I have no idea what it is supposed to represent or why it's a skill but the net result is that your Doubt hero can and will make beverages composed of icy fear. Which generally takes the form of coffee.  
  
Taken in small doses, the drink (generally called Klatch Coffee or KC by those hip to the SBURB lingo for whatever reason) will make one anxious and more prone to odd behavior; enhanced, it's going to fill you with terror, existential nightmares and possibly cause you to hallucinate, too. And I'm pretty sure that they use it unconsciously when operating drink machines, because there was a coffee machine in our Magicant and after I drank a cup that the Knight brought me the code for I always had to sit down until I stopped noticing every spider in the room and wondering how deadly they were. And then he figured out that he could make Klatch Coffee and alchemized a fire hose with an instant coffee maker and then everything went to hell in a hand basket.  
  
On the plus side, this stuff sobers up drunk people REALLY fast. Just make sure you don't overshoot; this can get a player anti-drunk. You'll be so sober that you'll start screaming with sheer, undiluted horror at the true nature of the game. You will need to drink a bottle of whiskey or three to just be normally, regular-person scared; forget about sobriety for a while, too.  
  


GLITCH: Haunted housekeeping

Doubt's not going to be afraid of the brain phantoms that the Psychoruins conjure up, since, y'know, their powers are based on said brain phantoms. Which is nice.  
  
A Doubt player is probably never going to clear out their Psychoruins because of this, so you're going to have to put up with spooky bullshit on occasion. Which is less nice.  
  
And because SBURB is programmed by people with a combination terrible sense of humor, a complete lack of coding skill and the ability to warp reality, the Doubt player is nine times out of ten going to have their Homefree inside a Psychoruins. Which is so far from nice that you can see the curvature of the planet. Do you really want to have to visit a 90's B-movie slasher flick every time you want to go find your sulking bro?  
  


Berserk Trigger

A Doubt player generally busts out [Nightmare] when they channel their aspect too much. What did you expect, it's always going to be a nightmare attack with your spooky fear channelers. You might as well expect a guy with a curly mustache and black top hat to not be a nefarious villain if you didn't see this coming.  
  
Anyway, [Nightmare] creates a huge old ball of Doubt's psychoillusions that briefly engulf the area and create a sort of fear barrier with the purpose of terrifying you into submission, a la the Psychoruins; the difference here is that the Psychoruins just manifest things from your mind and throw them at you with absolutely no forward planning or influence on you physically. You might get startled when the creepy guy busts through the door waving a knife, but you have like eighteen knives and three of them fire other, smaller knifes that explode. You'll be fine.  
  
Nightmares don't give you any power over them. And [Nightmare] will turn your own psyche against you. This doesn't scare you the way that a credible threat unnerves a grizzled veteran; this scares you in the way that a bad dream terrifies a six-year-old. Madmen will be terrified. Dersite Agents- carapaces with the fear reaction trained out of them- will be terrified. Your coplayers aren't going to be coherent. This power even scares the landscape- that's right, it can terrify things _that don't have thoughts to be terrified with._  
  
And your brain is the one doing all this to you. The Doubt player isn't summoning these things- it just creates a massive surplus of Spooky Bullshit Energy, which every living brain in the area and the landscape itself will harness to summon the monsters in their own heads. Doubt doesn't need to constantly throw monsters at you when you'll do it to yourself, and probably worse, too. If there's no people in range, it'll just exhaust itself by turning the area into a particularly potent, genuinely creepy Psychoruins.  
  
Personally, I recommend the drop kick here. If you can get them while they're casting, then the brain recognizes "yes hmm I have kicked this guy and he has reacted by recoiling, therefore he can't be too much of a threat" and the whole "Dome of Fear" thing will be more like a beach ball of discomfort, or baseball of perturbation.


End file.
